Federico Biancuzzi

This was a lengthy book. The interviewers did a fantastic job with their questions and covered a range of expert programmers and language designers across the spectrum. The important thing I gained from reading this book was my "enthusiasm" again for different programming languages and styles.
Each different language creator had some "opinions" about the state of affairs and went about in a personal way to do something about it, create a language, create a community, solve the problem, and show more usually building on top of what the person had learned from others. The language creation is both a scientific process (standing upon the shoulders of giants), as well as the unique taste that each language designer brought to the table. I was excited to learn more about AWK, Haskell, Perl, and Eiffel as languages after reading this book. show less

I think I have a hangover from my computer science undergraduate days as seeing language developers with a certain amount of awe. One side-effect of reading this set of interviews is that I have a much better picture of the diversity of language designers and it seems much more approachable now.

A few of the interviews seem rough, as if the interviewer and interviewee weren't quite talking about the same thing. Also, it seemed like for one or two of the group interviews that there were show more separate interviews that were combined.

There isn't as much computer science history in here as I had expected. More discussion revolved around current programming practices and future challenges. Not a bad thing, but it is a little suprising. show less

My problem reading interviews is that you have to get into the mind of the interviewer and interviewee. This was tough for me at times, sometimes the next question asked by the interviewer completely through me for a loop. There were some good stories in here and a wide range of ideas from influential people in the field.